I randomly woke up super early today (8:30!?) and thus decided t waste a half hour clicking through the front page of reddit. The 22nd result was a link called "New Imaging Technique Brings Nuclear Fusion Power a Step Closer to Reality - Futurism." It took me to a Futurism article talking about how people at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had found a new imaging technique. The article explains it pretty well. Anyway, for some reason they waited until the end of the article to put the actual exciting stuff. With this imaging technique, they were able to improve the efficiency of energy delivery to 7%, and computer simulations suggest that >15% efficiency could be achieved by scaling up the design. I was under the impression that in the past their efficiency was less than 1%. I wonder if useful fusion energy might actually be achieved in my lifetime. It certainly has an insanely long way to go, but now I think it might actually be possible.